Crowdfunder is looking for a thoughtful, strategic, and people-first People Lead (Maternity Cover) to help shape an environment where everyone on our team can thrive. You’ll lead our People strategy and ensure we continue to build an empowering, inclusive, and high-performing culture where our people can do their best work.
About Crowdfunder
We’re on a mission to spread positivity across the globe. Every day, we help turn bold, brilliant, community-powered ideas into reality - connecting changemakers with passionate backers and meaningful funding to go beyond the limits of traditional fundraising.
So far, we’ve helped hundreds of thousands of projects raise nearly £400 million for causes that matter and distributed over £40 million in extra funding through our partners.
Our values - United for Good, Empower Greatness, Think Creatively, and Always Human - are at the heart of everything we do. You'll be joining a passionate, values-led team that’s serious about making a difference and creating a workplace people genuinely enjoy being part of.
The role
This is a high-impact, 12-month maternity cover contract (ideally starting end of November 2025) for a hands-on generalist with a strong operational foundation and a deep commitment to people and culture.
You’ll report to one of our Co-CEOs and work closely with our leadership team to deliver a human-centred approach that supports our mission and ways of working.
As a team of one, you’ll own the entire employee experience, act as a trusted advisor and strategic partner to managers and leaders across the business, and lead on initiatives that grow, engage, and develop our UK remote-first team of ~40 people.
Key Responsibilities
- Lead our People strategy, ensuring it aligns with company goals and delivers meaningful and measurable impact
- Continue to develop a consistent, engaging employee experience, from hiring to farewell
- Coach and support leaders with diverse challenges from team development to performance and employee relations
- Run our compensation and performance review cycles, ensuring fairness, alignment, and clarity
- Champion culture, engagement, and wellbeing with initiatives that reflect our values, and support communication and collaboration in a remote-first environment
- Plan our quarterly in-person team days (usually somewhere in the South West), centred around connection, clarity, and purpose
- Oversee core People operations, keeping records accurate, systems running smoothly and effectively, and policies legally compliant (with support from our Head of Compliance)
- Manage employee relations with empathy, consistency, and legal soundness
- Design and roll out learning and development initiatives, helping team members grow their skills and careers
- Recruit brilliant people, including senior and technical roles, coaching hiring managers through a structured, inclusive, skills-based approach and maintaining excellent candidate experience
About You
You’re excited by the opportunity to lead the People function in a dynamic, remote-first tech-for-good startup. You’re a true People generalist who brings both strategic thinking and hands-on execution - the kind of person who rolls their sleeves up and gets things done. You care deeply about creating a fulfilling work experience for every team member. You know how to build systems that add value, cultures that empower, and teams that perform. And even if you haven’t done something before, you know how to figure it out.
You’ll likely bring:
- Broad experience across the full employee lifecycle - from recruitment, onboarding, and ER to learning and development, performance enablement, and compensation and benefits
- Previous senior or lead People or HR experience in a tech startup (early-stage/scaling) and a great understanding of the unique challenges and opportunities of this environment
- Confidence working with and influencing decision-making at senior leadership level
- A people-first mindset paired with the ability to design simple, effective, and right-sized systems and processes
- Excellent communication, coaching, and relationship-building skills
- A proactive, pragmatic, and collaborative approach, with comfort navigating ambiguity and shifting priorities
- Fluency in remote-first working and the ability to connect and build trust across distances
- Good working knowledge of UK employment law, and experience maintaining compliant HR policies and processes
- Empathy, emotional intelligence, and integrity in handling sensitive employee matters, and the ability to meet people where they are
- Bonus points if you’ve used our chosen tools: Google Workspace, Slack, Monday, Humaans, Teamtailor
In return:
Salary: £50-60k
Hours: Full time/37.5 hours (open to 30 hours/4 days)
Flexible location: We are open to either fully remote with occasional travel to meet the team in the South West, or hybrid if you’re located near one of our offices in Dorset or Cornwall. Everyone meets in-person four times a year for our team away days, and you may occasionally be asked to travel for leadership meetings or team workshops.
Our Perks And Benefits
🌴 35 days of annual leave including bank holidays (prorated for part-time)
🎂 An extra paid day off on your birthday
💗 Enhanced paid leave for all those important moments in life (e.g., dependants leave, compassionate leave)
💰 A generous pension scheme (we’ll top up anything you contribute above the standard amount by 10%)
🧠 Mental health support through our Employee Assistance Programme
👛 A personal wellbeing allowance of £75 each year
🌱 Learning and development opportunities, like courses, workshops, lunch and learns, and external speakers
👐 Opportunities to volunteer with amazing projects that are fundraising on our platform
Our application and interview process
We encourage you to put care into your application as this is how we’ll start to assess whether we’re the right fit for each other. Your answers to our questions are as important as your CV. We don’t mind if you use AI to help articulate your own thoughts and real life examples, but we want to hire a great
human so you’ll stand out if we can see your personality and unique perspective shine through!
This will be a 30-minute video call with Maria (whose maternity cover we’re hiring!) to get to know you and what you’re looking for in your next role, to answer any questions you might have, and to make sure we align on all the basics.
A one-hour interview with Maria and Dawn (Co-CEO). We’ll ask you to prepare some kind of practical task in advance, which you’ll present and discuss. This might be a short presentation where you explain your approach to a specific scenario, with some follow up questions.
- Values and behaviours interview
The final stage is a one-hour conversation with Si Deverell, Co-CEO and one more member of the Crowdfunder team, where the focus will be who you are as a team member. We’ll talk about your personal strengths and approach to work, how you communicate and collaborate with others, and alignment with our company values: United for Good, Empower Greatness, Think Creatively, and Always Human.
Reasonable adjustments: If you need any support or adjustments during the interview process, please let us know in your application. We can, for example, send you questions in advance. Simply let us know how we can help, and we’ll do our best to accommodate you.
Inclusion and diversity
Crowdfunder is tackling society's challenges, by making ideas happen. We connect projects that matter to people and companies who care.
We’re here to support diverse communities and to provide a platform for those who want to be heard; amplifying voices and impact is what we do. We value the fact that each one of us is different, with different perspectives - and we want to reflect the diversity of the crowd we serve.
We recognise that we don’t all start from the same place - because advantages and barriers exist - but through Crowdfunder and crowdfunding, we believe we can offer greater equality of opportunity.
We’re creating an inclusive workplace culture, based on fairness, respect, and honesty, because we believe leveraging differences achieves better results and better serves our crowd, our partners and our communities.
As part of that, we’re committed to educating ourselves, and each other, on gender, race, faith, disability, age, sexual orientation and other areas of diversity to ensure everyone is welcome and feels valued in our workplace as well as in our wider Crowdfunder community.
We recognise that ‘diversity and inclusion’ is not something that we will ever ‘achieve’. It’s not a box that can ever be ticked as ‘100% done’.
Diversity and inclusion is an ongoing journey of big steps and small nudges that will create a richer community and place to work and help us be a better business.
We’re proud to be on that journey together.
